Now build it out with an evocative vision. Improvise progress by tinkering: with lots of trial and lots of error. The not knowing is the best bit: the mysteries the surprises, and from time to time the windfalls!
Hello there, I'm Steve Collis!
Click on "contact", won't you, and wave right back at me?
I've had a lot of experience over recent years running workshops and giving presentations. Contact me at scollis@nbcs.nsw.edu.au if you are interested in booking me.
September 27th, 2009: Jokaydia Unconference, in Second Life: (Sunday 27th September) on Virtual Worlds: "Running a Closed Estate for our High School - our journey."
This is Steve (Stephen) Collis from Sydney, Australia. I'm a French/English teacher, and 'Head of Innovation' at Northern Beaches Christian School and its innovation arm, the Sydney Centre for Innovation in Learning. With much support from my school, I created, promote and administer the free e-twinning website Beyond Borders. Currently I am involved in all kinds of other projects, which you can read about at my blog. I love talking with colleagues, am always happy to run workshops or give presentations.
Pre-NBCS: I completed my BA in French/English + Dip Ed, worked as a programmer for Tricon Restaurants for a few months, manned the phones at a call centre, moved to Paris and taught business people English (awful) then students English (fun), then returned to Australia and did casual teaching for 6 months.
Northern Beaches Christian school: I started at NBCS as an English teacher with a bit of French in Year 8, but French got popular, and by 2007 became my entire load.
In 2005, with government funding, I launched Beyond Borders as a small collaborative project between French students at 8 Australian schools. Staff at my school were supportive rather than defensive, and set up a website for me running Moodle. Off I went!
In 2006 I opened up Beyond Borders to any subject, started an email newsletter, and recruited as far and as wide as I could. My school funded a trip to New Zealand for their language teaching conference, and I attended other local conferences, and before I knew it had 700 teachers and students using the site, from multiple countries in multiple projects. I won the Microsoft award.
I agreed in 2006 to start teaching French as an online subject in 2007. So I spent 2006 getting ready for that, setting up 40 units of work at our website http://hsconline.nsw.edu.au . You can see me advertising the course here. My school made me Learning Area Manager for Languages. With a staff of only two this is not an overwhelming responsibility but it's nice to be able to get things done without having to ask permission!
In 2007 Beyond Borders grew to 2,000 users. No mean feat, this, since every user is registered manually through me, every project created by me! I won more funding for it, created a generic structure for all online projects (previously they were too open ended), and started working on a DVD Tutorial, since my greatest challenge was getting teachers to give it a go without being strong with ICT. I won the National Quality Schools award. I was going to conferences left, right and centre (Cambodia, Singapore, Queensland, Victoria and heaps in Sydney). In this year I also went through a steep learning curve with teaching two senior classes French online. As for my face to face classes, my school put me in a computer room for every lesson, so I could experiment with all kinds of stuff.
In 2008 my school has given me a general role of promoting innovation. This is resulting in projects like www.nbcsgreenfingers.com, mobile blogging, and all the other projects you can read about at this site. The role is great, because I don't have to ask permission to do stuff, I just go ahead and make it happen. Beyond Borders keeps growing and the conferences keep coming. My online teaching has doubled and my face to face teaching has shrunk.
In May or June I stumbled on the OZ/NZ Educators group via Jess McCullogh. This was launched recently by Sue Tapp. We have videoconference meetings to swap ideas each week, and keep online records of useful sites and teaching projects. Everyone is also on 'twitter', which I am now thoroughly addicted to. It's lovely being able to interact with like-minded people. I've got myself a HTC TyTN2 PDA phone now which let's me access email and the Internet wherever I am, so I think I am now officially one of those hyperconnected types.
I've found it exhilarating the number of ideas flooding in to me from this group, and watching my ideas being used by others.
Not sure what the future holds but it has been an exciting ride so far. I feel very appreciative of my school and Principal for being so very supportive over the last three years. We often hear about school bureaucracies and set cultures blocking teachers' efforts at something new. It's the opposite where I am.
Summary for if you're busy: Voice recognition works brilliantly now, even in noisy environments. By far the best software is Dragon Naturally Speaking. Get the cheapest version "Standard". Click here for educational pricing. You're crazy not to buy a special microphone designed for voice recognition as well. Click here. Watch out! Even though it works fantastically, psychologically you'll find it quite uncomfortable, and if you don't work alone, consider privacy and annoyance.
Read on for a bit more detail:
Here's me dictating at almost 200 words per minute with 100% accuracy. I am using a headset designed for voice recognition, which I think is very important if you're going to bother buying the software.
But that's just a gimmick. In real life I don't each those speeds because I can't think of what I want to say that quickly!
I use voice recognition quite a bit to dictate emails and documents. Here’s some information for other teachers curious about it.
Why would I use it?
Not for speed. The claim that you can dictate text with voice recognition quicker than you can type it is not necessarily the case, especially if you can already type at a decent speed. I find that by the time I’ve made corrections, it is about the same speed as I type.
Because you’re sick of typing. This is my main reason. I just get sick of typing. My fingers get tired or sore. Or mentally I get annoyed at the effort and clunkiness involved with tapping each individual key for every last letter in every word.
Because you hate the paperwork of teaching. I use voice recognition mainly for the boring bits, e.g. writing teaching programs, giving feedback to numerous different students about the same task. Emailing various people on a similar topic. There is little creative fun in this sort of typing. It is repetitive and dull. Voice recognition is at its best for this. It lets me fly through it as quickly as I can talk, without getting tired fingers. Take, for instance, essay marking. Students make the same
mistakes over and over again. It is soul-destroying writing “start each paragraph with a topic sentence” or “ensure you integrate quotes into your sentences rather than just putting them by themselves” over, and over, and over again. I suppose you could use macros for this. And of course typing these comments is easier than handwriting them. Easier than all these, is voice recognition.
You’re in danger of repetitive strain injury. Or some other muscular problem. Or perhaps it’s too late, you’ve stuffed your fingers but are still in a job that requires heaps of text-production. I enjoy playing computer games in the evenings, and it’s too much for my fingers if I’m also typing.
How well does it work?
Very, very well. The technology is much, much better than it was 5 or 10 years ago. Here's a less gimmicky demonstration than the one above:
Accuracy is not 100%, but it isn’t far off (there are some words it always gets wrong with me). You can speak as quickly as you want to without hurting the accuracy, providing you’re speaking clearly. In fact, speaking in phrases or full sentences is much more accurate than dictate one or two words, because it gives the recognition program a context to help figure out what you said.
Correct by typing. The best way to use it is to have your fingers ready to correct bits here and there as you go. The program would rather that whenever you make a mistake, you retrain the program to avoid the error in future. Fair enough, but you come up against a law of diminishing returns. The program is already very accurate and it’s not worth me stopping to retrain every few sentences to push accuracy from 96% to 98%.
DANGER! DANGER! I often don’t notice errors. DANGER! DANGER! It is very difficult to accurately proof read your own dictated text. So many times I’ve reread my dictation carefully, and missed huge errors that make you look careless when your document is published, email received, or whatever. I was intrigued that a few years ago I noticed quite a few errors in a colleague’s emails, only to discover he was using voice recognition himself.
Which program to use?
Without a doubt, Dragon Naturally Speaking, which is miles ahead of any competition. The current version is 9.0 but they've patched it to 9.5 for free. There are three versions: Standard, Preferred, and Professional, but all have the same accuracy and the same speech engine, so you can get the cheapest version, Standard, and get the same performance, with fewer bells and whistles in the software.
The student price for the Standard version is as cheap as $60.
The teacher price for the Standard version is $100, and about for the Preferred version $200. That particular website offers to bundle Standard with a proper voice recognition headset (which I imagine is very good, like my recommendation below) for $179 or Preferred for $279. Read below to hear about how important the headset is. Don't bother with speech recognition if you're not willing to get a decent headset.
I recommend getting the Standard version for $100, and then buy the following headset separately.
Which headset should I use?
The microphone makes a big difference. Ah, now this is the important bit. Don’t use the microphone that comes with the software. Instead, invest in a proper microphone with built in Digital Signal Processing. This sort of microphone has circuitry built in that modifies the input even before it gets to the computer, isolating your voice and getting rid of other background noise. This improves accuracy remarkably. It also allows you to dictate in noisy environments, or even in the car! My wife and I drive to work together, and when she drives I’ve been known to dictate. Even against the noisy engine of our old Ford Laser, and Amy Grant on the CD player, accuracy is similar to in a quiet room by myself.
Plantronics DSP 400 The headset that I use, and can vouch for, is the Plantronics DSP 400. It works tops. My only criticism is that the joint at the top of it is fragile and breaks easily. Mine has been stuck together with tape since shortly after I purchased it. Look for cheap prices on this headset here. (As cheap as $70, although I don't necessarily recommend you order from the cheapest shop.)
My friends will laugh at this because I have a reputation for using sticky tape with just about everything.
How good a computer do I need?
Check the specs here: http://www.nuance.com/naturallyspeaking/preferred/sysreqs.asp. In particular you need a decent amount of memory, because on top of what you’re already using, the voice recognition program needs more. There is nothing worse than a computer that goes sluggish because it has been forced to use the hard disk for memory because it has run out of normal memory.
The negatives of using voice recognition:
Watch out! It feels very weird dictating. It is a very different mental space to typing. In casual conversation, it is normal to backtrack, trip up, reword, change direction, and even change opinion mid-sentence. And in conversation we tend to mumble, especially if we’re not absolutely sure of what we’re saying. To dictate properly you have to have in mind the next few words you’re going to say. Speech comes in bursts. To dictate they need to come in clear, confident bursts. I find I’ll dictate several short bursts of 7 or 8 words, and then go on a roll for a few sentences with no hesitation.
There is a process here of getting used to thinking before speaking, and then speaking with clear enunciation.
You become aware very quickly of which sounds you tend to mumble.
It can annoy colleagues. Some of my colleagues can block out sound and focus on their own work, even while I’m droning on in the background. Others can’t, and out of considerateness (or fear of retaliations!?!?) I avoid dictating while they’re around.
It can be embarrassing. For some reason, I find it very uncomfortable dictating emails when colleagues can hear me dictating, even if the emails are of a mundane nature. I think this is fascinating. I can only assume that, for me, composing emails requires a sense of private space. I tend to type emails rather than dictate them, if I have company in my staff room.
A funny video where a demonstration of Vista speech recognition stuffed up:
This video features a completely different speech recognition program, the one built into Vista. Even at it's best it is nowhere near as good as Dragon, but on this day it was definitely not at its best.
http://beyondborders.edu.au – the main site referred to in the presentation, providing a safe online environment for student communication and collaboration.
www.nbcsgreenfingers.com – Year 3 students learning about nature, publishing their work as if they were a business, offering to answer questions for donations to Cambodia
www.twitter.com – allows text messages to be sent to and from mobile phones to a network of friends.
#4 Headsets - for a class set
I recommend the Genius HS-04SU for being a great, ultra-cheap headset, so you can afford a class set.
Search for it at http://shopbot.com.au , although you have to be a bit careful about ordering from the cheapest places. (Email me for recommendations).
#5 Sites where you can set up a safe web page for your class:
(Click HERE to see the students' very first mobile blogs)
Well, I say MY students, but they're my colleague's students. They are fifteen 'Advanced English' students studying Wordsworth poetry, and I'm working with the teacher to integrate a mobile blogging project into the unit of work.
Anyway... yesterday I took the class for a lesson to set them up, and to take them out the back of our school into the bush to post a 'hello world' test blog. The setting up went quite smoothly. Students signed up at www.utterz.com, using their school email address and a nickname that is unrelated to their real names (their identities thus obscured), and entered in their mobile phone number. Utterz uses this information to recognise the student blogs. Students can instantly publish audio to the Internet by calling a local phone number, and images/text/video by emailing to go@utterz.com
The next step was to pipe their blogs from Utterz to the Wordpress blog that I had created for them: http://wordsworthreflections.wordpress.com. So they told Utterz.com what their wordpress username and password was.
Setting up took about 45 minutes, and then we walked out into the bush. Our school is right on the bush so this was easy.
At this point the student's don't really know anything about Wordsworth. The unit of work kicks off in three weeks after the school holidays. I know quite a bit about Wordsworth because I studied him at University and have taught him in English classes myself. So I gave the students an inspiring speech! Wordsworth saw the universe's authentic spiritual power in nature, I said. Nature was beauty and truth. Humanity's industry alienates us from this beauty and truth.
I asked students to split up and spread out, and find some space, and look around, and then ring the local utterz phone number and record an initial blog. The technology did not work for all students, but it was a great start. I was so excited to get back to school and, sure enough, their blogs were there at the website.
I can't wait until next term to see what comes of all this!
